Epic Games Storefront - A Good Incentive for Piracy
- Thread starter Wintermute
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
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You misconstrued every other argument I've made on this topic through a mouth of dripping drool, why would I bother trying again? You demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of what you're replying to even in this.
Here, let me finish this.
You have won the argument. I only said A and B and you read C and got confused about X but you won! You can't understand basic terms and their meanings, but you won! You can't admit your very clear biases, but you won!
Good to see reviews becoming a thing, though I don't agree with it being optional. Review bombs are definitely an issue, but so is burying negativity towards broken products/lying developers. I can't see any of them opting in when they're in the red, which is when the reviews are most needed for people looking to buy.
Hard to not just translate this as a "we don't want consumers to have a negative voice"
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The issue with this is that it's some players. Avoiding a review system to avoid negative feedback of any sort due to a segment of your customers (who probably have a reason to be pissed off anyway) is horseshit. The amount of "the big bad entitled bully toxic gamer" rhetoric (including the review bombs) that has been going around the last 1-2 years is reaching comical levels and is starting to be used as a way to coverup the stink on shitty developers. It's both some players and some developers that are the reason for this situation.
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Utnayan
F16 patrolling Rajaah until he plays DS3
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I like the way steam does their reviews. All reviews and most recent. Since the game, and support for said game, or mass changes, can effect the here and now. They should be adopting that methodology.
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OU Ariakas
Diet Dr. Pepper Enjoyer
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Why not require owning the game and having a certain amount of in game played time before you can write a review? Make it 1 minute longer than the return policy so you don't have snipers. Done.
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Yeah, I'm with you on this. One big issue might be in the case of refunds though. People should know if people are refunding it due to tech issues or whatever, but you can only do that in under 2 hours of playtime. On the flipside, it would help avoid the drive-by purchase-refund people just wanting to be assholes.
My biggest issue with the review system is all the retarded trolly joke reviews that make finding real reviews/obvious fake reviews all the more difficult.
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gshurik
Tranny Chaser
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- Relay servers provided by Valve, free of charge for any game released on Steam (opt-in, price is essentially included in the 30% tax). Developers can either proxy to their own game servers or use Valve-provided dedicated ones (only for Valve-approved developers at the moment).
- Servers are "hidden" from the outside world, players can no longer know their IPs and connect directly
- Free of charge DDoS protection included as well
- All connections are routed through Valve's backbone, which provides lower pings and higher speeds and throughput
- Platform-independent account identity support (Xbox Live, Steam, PSN, etc.)
- Beta only at the moment. Developers should not use this in the production environment until all the functionality is shipped
This is the kind of shit Epic should have offered instead of forcing people into using a feature limited platform by coaxing devs with cash.
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Don't forget shouldering the infrastructure costs of the steam keys given out to sales on other platforms like Humble
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Utnayan
F16 patrolling Rajaah until he plays DS3
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Yeah I agree with you here. Half these people are just looking for Likes and Funny marks as they think they are the next gaming review comedic genius. And it's burying the solid reviews. I am mostly sticking to comments made by friends now if I see them, or if I see they own the game I ask them.
Vorph
Silver Baronet of the Realm
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Epic had to go the bribery route because their store has almost zero actual features besides the ability to take payment for a product. It'll probably take them a year to get something as basic as cloud saves implemented, nevermind anything remotely approaching what SteamWorks offers. One of the best parts of playing a game on Steam now is that you no longer need to dick around with DS4W to get a DualShock 4 to work perfectly (even via Bluetooth, which DS4W still has problems with). Any game that properly implements the SteamWorks API will even automatically shift button prompts in the UI from Xbox to PS. When do you suppose stuff like that will be a feature for games on Epic's store?
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I think if the Epic store situation has taught me anything, it's just how much I took Steam's features for granted. I barely paid any of it a second thought and did more bitching about the faults than I did appreciating the positives. I didn't care about Origin or Uplay because they were publisher specific platforms, and Humble/GMG just sold Steam keys anyway, but now that a platform is trying to be a universal platform completely separate from Steam (Like GoG but without the DRM approach) the differences are night and day.
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Utnayan
F16 patrolling Rajaah until he plays DS3
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I totally get it. Like I stated in a previous post though, they are trying to disrupt the market and right now this is the only way they can get it off the ground. I have never seen a competitive product that is supposed to be a market disruptor come in with the same parity the competing product does. If they don't add that functionality, people won't use it. Over time though, if they do, and keep costs down to publishers (Which honestly, will pass to us for a brief period but I would bet those publishers keep the profits later rather than pass them along, that's just common sense) they will be a force. But we are probably talking years from now.
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Usually they would come in with a novel features, but the problem is that paradoxically we the consumers aren't actually the store's customer - the publishers are.
I'm not a lawyer, but I something I've wondered is whether Epic's discount for Unreal Engine users might cause them legal problems for using their dominance in one market to move into another.
Quineloe
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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What do you feel is a review not related to the game? Spyware installed such as Red Shell? Excessive DRM crippling the performance? Because those have caused review bombing in the past, but I feel like it was completely warranted in both situations.
Review Bombing for Mass Effect 3 Endings? Skyrim's paid mods review bombings? What about the GTA V review bombings after R* sent cease&desist to the OpenIV Mod people?
If it's the Chinese, is that legit or just unfair review bombing, for example when they changed a quote in Kerbal Space Program or when they had a VPN ad in PUBG?
That was quite a lot, and it goes to show that there are often very real game-related reasons review bombing is happening, but usually the publisher is completely tone deaf and calls all of it unfair review bombing, e.g. when the community manager of Civ VI started threatening bans on the steam forum on people who kept bringing up the Red Shell spyware. I bet they really thought the review bombing on Rise&Fall was completely unfair.
"Couldn't get it to work, just crashed endlessly when I launched it, so I refunded it" is a valid review though.